There was one other factor that he could not have explained to Paris over the phone, and which he dreaded having to explain to Lebel face to face. Unbeknown to him, some of his men came across this factor before midnight. A group of them were interviewing a farmer in his cottage two miles from the spot where the car was found.
He stood in the doorway in his nightshirt, pointedly refusing to invite the detectives in. From his hand the paraffin lamp cast flickering splashes of light over the group.
‘Come on, Gaston, you drive along that road to market pretty often. Did you drive down that road towards Egletons on Friday morning?’
The peasant surveyed them through narrowed eyes.
‘Might have done.’
‘Well, did you or didn’t you?’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Did you see a man on the road?’
‘I mind my own business.’
‘That’s not what we’re asking. Did you see a man?’
‘I saw nobody, nothing.’
‘A blond man, tall, athletic. Carrying three suitcases and a hand-grip?’
‘I saw nothing. J’ai rien vu, tu comprends.’
It went on for twenty minutes. At last they went, one of the detectives making a meticulous note in his book. The dogs snarled on the ends of their chains and snapped at the policemen’s legs, causing them to skip to one side and step in the compost heap. The peasant watched them until they were back on the road and jolting away in their car. Then he slammed the door, kicked an inquisitive goat out of the way and clambered back into bed with his wife.
‘That was the fellow you gave a lift to, wasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘What do they want with him?’
‘Dunno,’ said Gaston, ‘but no one will ever say Gaston Grosjean helped give away another creature to them.’ He hawked and spat into the embers of the fire. ‘Sales flics.’
He turned down the wick and blew out the light, swung his legs off the floor and pushed further into the cot against the ample form of his wife. ‘Good luck to you, mate, wherever you are.’
*
Lebel faced the meeting and put down his papers.
‘As soon as this meeting is over, gentlemen, I am flying down to Ussel to supervise the search myself.’
There was silence for nearly a minute.
‘What do you think, Commissaire, that can be deduced from this?’
‘Two things, Monsieur le Ministre. We know he must have bought paint to transform the car, and I suspect enquiries will show that if the car was driven through the night from Thursday into Friday morning from Gap to Ussel, that it was already transformed. In that case, and enquiries along these lines are proceeding, it would appear he bought the paint in Gap. If that is so, then he was tipped off. Either somebody rang him, or he rang somebody, either here or in London, who told him of the discovery of his pseudonym of Duggan. From that he could work out that we would be on to him before noon, and on to his car. So he got out, and fast.’
He thought the elegant ceiling of the conference room was going to crack, so pressing was the silence.
‘Are you seriously suggesting,’ somebody asked from a million miles away, ‘there is a leak from within this room?’
‘I cannot say that, monsieur. There are switchboard operators, telex operators, middle and junior level executives to whom orders have to be passed. It could be that one of them is clandestinally an OAS agent. But one thing seems to emerge ever more clearly. He was tipped off about the unmasking of the overall plan to assassinate the President of France, and decided to go ahead regardless. And he was tipped off about his unmasking as Alexander Duggan. He has after all got one single contact. I suspect it might be the man known as Valmy whose message to Rome was intercepted by the DST.’
‘Damn,’ swore the head of the DST, ‘we should have got the blighter in the post office.’
‘And what is the second thing we may deduce, Commissaire?’ asked the Minister.
‘The second thing is that when he learned he was blown as Duggan, he did not seek to quit France. On the contrary, he headed right into the centre of France. In other words, he is still on the trail of the head of state. He has simply challenged the whole lot of us.’
The Minister rose and gathered his papers.
‘We will not detain you, M. le Commissaire. Find him. Find him, and tonight. Dispose of him if you have to. Those are my orders, in the name of the President.’
With that he stalked from the room.
An hour later Lebel’s helicopter lifted away from the take-off pad at Satory and headed through the purpling-black sky towards the south.
‘Impertinent pig. How dare he. Suggesting that somehow we, the topmost officials of France, were at fault. I shall mention it, of course, in my next report.’
Jacqueline eased the thin straps of her slip from her shoulders and let the transparent material fall to settle in folds round her hips. Tightening her biceps to push the breasts together with a deep cleavage down the middle, she took her lover’s head and pulled it towards her bosom.
‘Tell me all about it,’ she cooed.
18
THE MORNING OF August 21st was as bright and clear as the previous fourteen of that summer heat-wave had been. From the windows of the Château de la Haute Chalonnière, looking out over a rolling vista of heather-clad hills, it looked calm and peaceful, giving no hint of the tumult of police enquiries that was even then enveloping the town of Egletons eighteen kilometres away.
The Jackal, naked under his dressing gown, stood at the windows of the Baron’s study making his routine morning call to Paris. He had left his mistress asleep upstairs after another night of ferocious lovemaking.
When the connection came through he began as usual ‘Ici Chacal’.
‘Ici Valmy’ said the husky voice at the other end. ‘Things have started to move again. They have found the car …’
He listened for another two minutes, interrupting only with a terse question. With a final ‘merci’ he replaced the receiver and fumbled in his pockets for cigarettes and lighter. What he had just heard, he realised, changed his plans whether he liked it or not. He had wanted to stay on at the château for another two days, but now he had to leave, and the sooner the better. There was something else about the phone call that worried him, something that should not have been there.
He had thought nothing of it at the time, but as he drew on his cigarette it niggled at the back of his mind. It came to him without effort as he finished the cigarette and threw the stub through the open window on to the gravel. There had been a soft click on the line soon after he had picked up the receiver. That had not happened during the phone calls over the past three days. There was an extension phone in the bedroom, but surely Colette had been fast asleep when he left her. Surely … He turned and strode briskly up the stairs on silent bare feet and burst into the bedroom.
The phone had been replaced on its cradle. The wardrobe was open and the three suitcases lay about the floor, all open. His own keyring with the keys that opened the suitcases lay nearby. The Baroness, on her knees amid the debris, looked up with wide staring eyes. Around her lay a series of slim steel tubes, from each of which the hessian caps that closed the open ends had been removed. From one emerged the end of a telescopic sight, from another the snout of the silencer. She held something in her hands, something she had been gazing at in horror when he entered. It was the barrel and breech of the gun.